HARRY REDKNAPP has confirmed he will take the director of football job at Derby - just months after he branded the role a joke.

Redknapp has been out of work since leaving QPR in February last season.

His role, he says, will be to compliment Darren Wassall who took over after Paul Clement was sacked last month.

Redknapp said:"The call from Derby came completely out of the blue but this is an exciting challenge and hopefully we can finish the season in the play-off final at Wembley.

"I know the Championship, I know how difficult it can be and my experience will hopefully prove invaluable.

"I never thought I'd become a director of football but my role at Derby is completely different and it is only going to run until the end of the season, when I hope we will all be celebrating promotion back to the Premier League.

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"I won't be pushing players onto the manager or having anything to do with signings and it is all about helping Darren.

"I'll be doing a few days a week to assist with the coaching and I'll be someone the manager can bounce ideas off. Management can be a lonely job, especially when it's your first position, and I am here to help in any way I can.

"The chairman, Mel Morris, called me at 7.30 on the Sunday night and I drove up on Monday morning to speak to him. I liked what he had to say and it was important to me that the manager had no issues with me coming in.

"Derby are an ambitious club with fantastic facilities and it was an opportunity I couldn't turn down."

GETTY

Harry Redknapp joins Darren Wassall at Derby

However in November Redknapp called the role a nonense.

He said: “It totally undermines your role as manager if you’re not picking the players. It’s a joke really that you are expected to work with someone else’s players. It’s all very well someone recommending players to you but when they don’t work out, it’s your head on the block.

“I’m just not in favour of that. As a manager I have to select the players, train them every day and make decisions. To expect me to work with players someone else has decided I want is a nonsense. I want to make my own decisions and rightfully so. If things don’t work out fine, I’m responsible for that. But why should I be accountable for someone else’s mistakes?

“My head’s on the block when it goes wrong so no I’m not going to support something that could cost me my job and I have no say in it.”